Analysis: Trump’s smuggling claims would surprise Border Patrol

By Philip Bump | Washington Post
During his Friday announcement that he would declare a national emergency to build a wall on the border with Mexico, President Donald Trump covered a wide range of topics, many related to immigration.
One focus of his remarks was the need for a wall on the border, a case he’s been making repeatedly since the government shutdown began in December. Trump’s rhetoric follows a consistent pattern: Talk about objectively bad things – drug overdoses, human trafficking – and then claim that a wall is necessary to prevent those things from happening.
Here was what he said about those things on Friday and about ports of entry, designated checkpoints on the border where people can enter the U.S. legally.
“A big majority of the big drugs, the big drugloads don’t go through ports of entry,” Trump said. “They can’t go through ports of entry. You can’t take big loads because you have people. We have some very capable people, the Border Patrol, law enforcement, looking.”
“You can’t take human traffick – women and girls, you can’t them through ports of entry, you can’t have them tied up in the back seat of a car or a truck or a van,” he continued. Border agents “open the door. They look. They can’t see three women with tape on their mouth or three women whose hands are tied? They go through areas where you have no wall.”
“Everybody knows that,” he concluded, singling out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. “Nancy knows it. Chuck knows it. They all know it. It’s all a big lie. It’s a big con game.”
This is, to put it bluntly, nonsense.
First of all, we know that drugs flow through ports of entry because Trump’s own administration has repeatedly said they do. …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Politics